Backlog refinement is essential for project teams that use Agile methodology, and it’s an indispensable process in Scrum. According to research, as much as 91% of project management professionals say that their organizations are running into project management issues.
If your team is constantly struggling to meet their goals at the end of most sprints and carrying things over into the next one, then it’s probably high time to focus on backlog refinement.
But, before you can tackle your product’s backlog and clean it up, you’ll need to become familiar with all the moving parts, key players, and activities involved in backlog refinement.
What Is Backlog Refinement?
Backlog refinement, also known as backlog grooming or management, is the process that involves product owners, managers, developers, and other team members getting together in order to review, refine, and prioritize items and tasks that are in (your) product’s backlog.
This helps your team focus on high-priority tasks for the next sprint, plan its current sprint with precision, and prevent tickets from piling up. The process of refining a product backlog also channels your team’s effort toward features and functionalities that the business itself and the customers actually want.
It’s important to point out that effective backlog refinement is not something you do periodically but rather a continuous process carried out by the product owner, manager, scrum master, and other key members of the team.
Why Refining a Backlog Is Necessary
Backlog refinement introduces a high level of transparency by discussing backlog items until everyone is on the same page. It also enables developers to provide an assessment of how much time it will take them to complete items within a sprint.
Another benefit of refining a product backlog is the identification of high-priority items. This helps the scrum team save time, as they often come across new findings that will make low-priority items and tasks redundant or obsolete.
Backlog Grooming vs Backlog Refinement: What’s the Difference?
Backlog grooming and backlog refinement are interchangeable terms. However, even though they have the same meaning, the term “refinement” has become more widely accepted in recent years due to the negative connotation of the word “grooming”.
Originally, grooming was supposed to invoke a natural process related to trimming and cleaning hair or a plant. Backlog management is another term synonymous with these two.
What is a DEEP Backlog?
In the context of backlog refinement, DEEP stands for:
- Detailed appropriately – Backlog items should provide enough information to create a user story, while not being overly detailed. In other words, developers should have all the context and all the info they need to complete a task or a ticket by looking at it
- Emergent – Nothing regarding a product backlog should be fixed or set in stone. A product backlog should undergo constant evolution, and any team member should be able to add more information to tickets and tasks, as well as add or remove tasks altogether
- Estimated – At the core of every product backlog is an estimate of how long it should take to complete each upcoming item. This is why the backlog is such an effective tool for organizing your team’s resources
- Prioritized – Backlog items should be ranked in order of priority. Tasks that relate the most to the goal of the sprint should receive high priority and be placed at the top
How to Do Backlog Refinement: The Backlog Refinement Meeting
At the core of every backlog refinement process is the backlog refinement meeting, which is a collaborative meeting that occurs on a regular basis – about every two weeks or before each sprint planning meeting.
During the meeting, issues on the backlog are analyzed, adjusted, and ranked. This can involve anything from small additions, such as adding item descriptions, to those that are more complex in their nature, like splitting or merging issues.
Backlog refinement meeting also enables you, the product owner, as well as the scrum master and the development team to do the following:
- Review the backlog
- Update, confirm, or remove user stories
- Rank each story by priority
- Review the time estimated for each of the stories
- Add new user stories
Who Participates in the Meeting?
Although you initiate and run the backlog refinement meeting as the product owner, the entire scrum team participates in the discussion. In fact, you should avoid refining the backlog on their own. Instead, you should at least consult with the developers in order to make sure that all backlog items are clearly understood and that they can be done within a sprint.
Including team members with different skill sets, such as testers, business analysts, stakeholders, and subject matter experts can be beneficial, as it provides additional information needed for backlog items and/or user stories.
Basic Steps for Refining a Product Backlog
The process may differ depending on the project management tool, but the basic sequence of backlog refinement should include the following steps:
- Open ActiveCollab, or some other project management tool
- Find the backlog
- Arrange the issues in order of priority (check out our guide on how to prioritize tasks quickly)
- Provide more details for the issues at the top of the backlog, including time estimates and assignees
- Remove duplicate issues
- Separate large tasks into smaller subtasks if needed
Challenges of Refining a Backlog
Backlog refinement is a complex process that can challenge even the most well-oiled development teams. And there are plenty of things that can make the refinement process even more complicated, including:
Poor Communication Between the Product Owners and the Developers
This is especially true for teams that are new, those that are working on a product that is brand new, and in some cases, both. There are several culprits to blame for the lack of clear communication between the POs and the developers.
Teams that are distributed across the globe often face this problem, as it’s very easy to get distracted by something else during virtual meetings. “Sorry, I was on mute” became a polite way of saying “I wasn’t paying attention”. The language barrier can also be a root cause of these communication issues.
Last, but not least, some team members may be too afraid to ask questions for fear that they might say something wrong or appear incompetent in front of their colleagues.
ActiveCollab circumvents these common challenges and seamless team collaboration through its powerful communications feature that includes live in-app chat, real-time notifications, and the ability to create custom groups, user roles, and subscriptions so that everyone stays in the loop.
You can easily mention entire teams, specific members of the team, or a single person working on one particular task. This feature also enables Slack integration, allowing you to receive notifications from your ActiveCollab workspace on Slack.
Stories That Are Always Too Large for a Single Sprint
This is usually a sign that the team didn’t dedicate enough time to refining items during backlog refinement. Large units of work are usually a recipe for disaster since actual work is always more challenging and more intensive than originally predicted.
The whole idea behind refinement meetings is to break up work into smaller chunks which can be completed throughout a single sprint.
With ActiveCollab’s Workload Management feature, you can distribute the workload fairly among your team members, not just to make sure that everything gets done on time, but also to prevent employee burnout, which is all too common nowadays.
More specifically, you can set up the default daily capacity for your employees, and get a comprehensive view of their overtime hours, so that nobody is burdened with more than they can and should handle.
Agreeing on the Definition of Ready for Refined User Stories
If your team hasn’t agreed on a Definition of Ready, this might be why:
- Acceptance of a user story into the sprint without a mockup attached;
- Working on stories that have no acceptance criteria or description;
- Accepting a user story and working on it before receiving confirmation from the stakeholders.
If the answer to one or more of these is “yes”, then you don’t have a DoR or you have one which is incomplete.
Tips for Improving Backlog Refinement
Backlog refinement doesn’t need to be complicated, provided that you implement the following tips and guidelines:
- Think about task dependencies – When ranking tickets, be mindful of the fact that there are some tickets that depend on the successful completion of another ticket. If these dependencies aren’t caught early on and clearly labeled, they will get in the way of refinement. Always double-check for them before prioritizing your tickets.
- Keep your meetings lean – We have previously mentioned that backlog refinement meetings should involve the entire scrum team. However, that applies only to stakeholders who are actually a part of the upcoming sprint, such as the project manager and team members who are handling tickets. This way, you can avoid unnecessary chatter.
- Allocate sufficient time – Backlog refinement is an ongoing process, which means you’ll need to set aside enough time for it during the sprint. The amount of time you’ll need to allocate will depend on the state of the backlog itself.
- Split large user stories – An unwritten rule is that user stories should never be larger than half the sprint, which is one week, and we are talking about the worst-case scenario here. Usually, most user stories shouldn’t take more than one to three days to complete.
- Seek advice and opinions from team members who are more experienced – while junior developers certainly have their place, they are usually not very well-versed when it comes to providing time estimates or details to backlog items. In this particular case, look to more experienced team members.
Frequently Asked Questions About Backlog Refinement
In this section, we will address the most common question regarding to backlog refinement:
How long should backlog refinement take?
Backlog refinement shouldn’t take up more than 10% of the development team’s capacity. Although this is not something that is specified by the Scrum Guide, it’s a generally accepted rule of thumb.
Product owners, on the other hand, can invest more of their resources into refining the backlog, as well as involve other members of the scrum team.
What is the purpose of backlog refinement?
The purpose is to have the product backlog ready for the sprint planning meeting so that the meeting is more streamlined and to achieve more sprint commitments.
Is backlog refinement a time-boxed activity?
No, refinement is not a time-boxed activity but a continuous process. What it does share with formal scrum events is the presence of a clear outcome.
However, the tasks that your time performs after the backlog refinement meeting are, and ActiveCollab’s time tracking tools enable you to keep an eye on how many hours are spent doing each task.
Who runs backlog refinement?
The product owner runs the backlog regiments meets. Other members of the team, such as product managers, scrum masters, and at least one developer, also attend these meetings.
How many backlog refinement meetings should there be per sprint?
There is no strict number when it comes to the frequency of backlog refinements. However, it is recommended to hold a refinement meeting once a week throughout a two-week sprint. For longer sprints, meetings can be less frequent, for example, every two weeks or so.
Conclusion – How ActiveCollab Makes Backlog Refinement Smooth
Implementing all of the best backlog refinement practices and avoiding the most common pitfalls may seem overwhelming at first, but with ActiveCollab, you will have all the right tools to make the entire process as streamlined as possible.
Interested to know more? Sign up for our 14 day free trial, or book a demo and our representatives will walk you through all features, and help you understand better how ActiveCollab makes backlog refinement smooth!